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Search Three Book Searches at Once

I think I’m setting some kind of record for the number of metasearch engines I’m covering in one month. Anyway, there’s a site at http://kokogiak.com/booksearch that allows you to search Google Book Search, A9, and Windows Live Search (for books) at the same time.

I did a search for Randy Cassingham, who does the THIS IS TRUE newsletter. Now here’s what’s weird. The search results are provided in three panels — A9, Google Book Search, and Windows Live Search. Google Book Search and A9 gave me immediate results, though with different books in their first ten results. Windows Live Search, however, provided no results.

Thinking maybe the Live search was down, I did a very easy search — for Smith. That one got results in the Live search. A little more specific search — pathophysiology — got four results. (This is compared to over 10,000 on A9 and over 1,000 on Google Book Search.) Certain author names, however, got no results at all. So apparently the search is working, but the data pool isn’t nearly as big as the first two sites.

When I first visited this site, I thought it would be interesting to compare what kind of results the different book searches get. I’m really, really surprised to see that the Live results provides so many fewer results than the first two. Could this possibly be right?

Possible problem — clicking on a result from Google Book Search or Live Search goes directly to that engine’s page for the result. However clicking on an A9 result did nothing….